~ Verus Conditio

Another Excellent Man Movie

For the past year or so we’ve been watching old, classic movies. They are so much better than what is currently being released. We have recently gotten into John Wayne and I think I have a serious crush.

I just finished watching McLintock! on Maritus’s recommendation and it is fantastic. I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of bed.

If you have Netflix, it is streaming there. If you don’t, get your hands on this movie. Call your friends. Get some beer and wings, a big ol’ T-bone, or half a pig and cook it up.

The women in this movie are stunningly beautiful and the leading men are wonderfully masculine.

17 thoughts on “Another Excellent Man Movie”

John Wayne movies require an IQ less than 70 to really enjoy AND understand…so I suggest an extended glue sniffing party before hand.
What you don’t get is all that hippie stupidity came from somewhere… and one of the great sources of that stupidity was all-american John Wayne…whose intelligence as a human male was something less than the cartoon character popeye – and whose movies were the lowpoint in terms of ass-wipe jingoism and cultural cretinism.

All that shootin n’ killin the Duke was reckoning with was solely to make the world safe for hippies, coin shavers, pawn shops owners and a great human tide of imbecilic meat.
Freedumb and Dumbocracy! Oh yeah! John Wayne! We need someone really, really stupid to change things around here.

There are 3 John Wayne movies that I regularly point to as instructional to young men and highly entertaining to all. Curiously, in none of them does he play a cowboy or (active) soldier. May I recommend for your enjoyment: Hatari!, Donovan’s Reef, and The Quiet Man. Each feature, it should be noted, some really great leading ladies and entirely wonderful character actors.

At the risk of feeding the etroll… I think that everyone exists somewhere on what I call “The Rons Scale”. Some are less rons. Some are more rons. What we have up there is heavily on the more ron side.

I will definitely be checking out those movies and watching them with my husband. We have been only watching the Westerns up to this point. I watched another called The Man Who Shot Liberty Vance last night. It wasn’t as good as McLintock but I liked it as well.

Thanks John, I’m sure the ‘ron scale’ is packed with human insight.
Sorry if I am trolling… I came to this site from a link from some rationalist blog…. and when I read the first part, I knew I should just leave.
But I’d like to know how you could see movies and actors that were obviously social engineering projects, as something beneficial and inspiring – (Many J Wayne movies are documented world war and cold war propaganda subsidized by Gov.) making men into dumb and brutal killers who fly overseas to kill without any justification, without thought, a few million asians, Europeans or even americans or anyone at all…..then home again and it’s mom and apple pie, no problems and total docility towards their masters… and the usual lies about how decent and upstanding they are.

I just honestly want to know how you can justify lauding a non-actor like John Wayne as an actor. Or the majority of his movies as anything but propaganda. But just now I looked at the ‘about’ on your page and realized you were a women…..ahhh, now I understand….
John Wayne is not a man to you, he’s daddy. therefore the unreal alpha male and the endless source of goods of a woman’s mind.

You don’t think about what a man really is – and I’m not talking about Peregrine John and his ‘ron scale’… and you probably don’t care beyond your own needs and some imaged figure…a stereotype….but not an archetype. You see watching propaganda films as character building, because this propaganda was designed to influence you, as a woman, and as families, into shaping your man, and your male child into a thoughtless do-gooder who does only good for himself and calls only good for himself – the only good, a stereotype who will always do ‘what’s right,’ for himself, and never for what is right according the mind God has granted you.
Now you can call me a troll way off the ‘ron scale’ or whatever you want. I’m just sharing my thoughts which you may not find pleasant to contemplate… if you enjoy ‘John Wayne’ movies.
But as a man I can tell you ‘John Wayne’ never existed in real life, and his movies are as divorced from reality as it is possible to get.
‘Team America World Police’ is more realistic, conveys more truth through it’s humour than any JW film, yet it was a stupid cartoon made with marionettes.

Now some of JW’s films were fairly good family fare. I liked ‘Liberty Valance’, ‘The Alamo’ and ‘The Searchers’ (which is widely considered the finest and most complex role he ever undertaken).
And I’ve met John Wayne personally in 1977 when I worked on the salvage of his yacht ‘Wild Goose II” in Barclays Sound off the west coast of Vancouver Island. At the time he was sick,drunk and overtly upset about his boat, which a friend of his had run up on rocks in a remote wilderness inlet, and sunk it in 40’ of sea. I can’t judge him over that episode, because as I said he was sick and drunk, and he loved his boat and was heartsick over the senseless loss of it (it was re-floated, repaired and is now on a disney lot, or was…) so he just stood on deck and stared pensively at his boat, visible under the surface, continually asking us to go down and find some memento onboard, while we repeatedly told him everything onboard not hardcased was lost. (this is just a fun fact which has no bearing on anything….low on the ron scale.)
I remember looking at him and thinking ‘so this man was the cut out for American institutionalized murder and commercialized body count. The great American hero, a trifecta of MacNamara, Rumsfield, Westmoreland and Santa Claus….the type of people who openly advocated the wholesale mass killing of civilians, (the verifiable count is well into the 100’s of millions, and is not limited to SE asia or Germany – they murdered overtly or covertly all over the world)….and did it as outside observers with no stake beyond war profits and political gain…and then went home to mom and apple pie, and probably excited the women favourably, all the mass death was outside the picket fence…the way women like it.

I don’t want to seem like I’m blaming you or trolling off the ron scale.But I just want to tell you, as a man. if this world is ever to be a sane place to live and if man is ever going to actually deserve the right to live, not by killing someone and taking his goods and place, but actually being worthy of the honour of life itself….John Wayne and all these lying and sickenly hypocritical, false and misleading portrayals of men, not as we really are, but as how others wish to fool ourselves into thinking we need to be something that is evil, yet is called good – even traditional, old fashioned, when it is nothing of the kind.

Now the reason for this high ron-scale rant is because I came to your blog from another where they were hating on hippies. Now few hate hippies or 60’s american culture, as much as I do (from experience…) ….but what I tried to explain to him is that you must conside the source of the high ron scale stupidity of hippie culture and it’s aftermath, is ‘where did it come from?”

People have this myopic idea the stupidity just arose out of nowhere, most likely from foreign sources (Frankfurt School etc.) and like to comfort themselves by belonging to a more traditional culture, a’la John Wayne. What you must realize is that these hollywood westerns are as fictional as science fiction like Dune or Star Trek – they have only a most tenuous connection to the reality of frontier life.
They are overtly political and a collection of lies and fabrications as covert political messages always are.

You think you are respecting traditional morals and modes of life, but you are not….you couldn’t be more divorced from reality. What you are respecting is a televized rendition, a hollywood facade, not reality. Have you ever seriously and soberly thought about how much your view of history is soley shaped by the television and the movie screen? Probably not, because it’s terribly unflattering, and requires thought and honesty…which most normal Americans do not like to mix unless there is monetary gain. Because if you are honest, your entire world view, even how you feel about your dog or your sister much less larger questions, has been profoundly influenced, even reshaped by commercial visualized media. Do you think these people who make these films, and the people who own the studios are not profoundly aware of the power they hold? How people just follow along like sheep the two dimensional image? The contrived fiction which both flatters one’s narcissism as well as one’s insecurities while gently nudging one into a world view that furthers their ends, not yours….and does this in a slow wave-like incremental brainwashing repeated day after day, week after week, year after year, not just to oneself, but to everyone one knows , to an entire country, culture, hemisphere and soon the entire world?

The stupidity has always been there….John Wayne is as much a part of the lie as Abbie Hoffman and Tim O’Leary, just a different side of the same coin.

You don’t think about what a man really is – and I’m not talking about Peregrine John and his ‘ron scale’… and you probably don’t care beyond your own needs and some imaged figure…a stereotype….but not an archetype.

You’ve read only this post? Then you don’t know how I see men. I’ve many other post wherein I talk about men and masculinity. You can see my views there.

But as a man I can tell you ‘John Wayne’ never existed in real life, and his movies are as divorced from reality as it is possible to get.

Of course. I can’t think of a single movie off the top of my head that is not utterly divorced from reality. That’s why people watch them. Is it dangerous that they take away what they think of truth from them? Absolutely. One can reach a point and realize the movies *truth* is utter crap and stil enjoy the movie itself. It’s entertainment. McLintock is extremely entertaining and I would say probably one of the family fair movies you talked about. I haven’t seen the other two you mentioned. Just a handful at this point and all Westerns. I called it a great Man Movie because his wife in the film goes back and forth between utterly admiring his masculinity and being a shrew. The way he handles her is fantastic. Yes, I have a crush, on Mclintock and Hondo and Tom Doniphon (not to mention Ransom Stoddard even though I don’t care for lawyers). It’s me being playful because I admire masculinity. In real life John Wayne was a drunk who couldn’t film anything after noon. I understand he was also an angry drunk. Beyond that, I don’t know anything about the man. I don’t have a crush on John Wayne, I couldn’t. I admire what these films portray as men. These films. I can’t speak for any others yet.

The rest of your post seems to be talking about the war movies Wayne made. I haven’t seen any of them and don’t plan to. Never had planned to. I don’t care for them and I don’t know anything about them so I will take your word for it. I do know that the Pentagon went about propaganda starting in the 50’s I believe, so I am not terribly surprised by what you have said. And yes, I do know the Westerns are fiction. I don’t think Clint Eastwood tamed a hooker/nun either. It’s entertainment and I see it as such. But, you yourself said that some of these movies are good family fare. I see McLintock as that. Hondo as well.

Have you ever seriously and soberly thought about how much your view of history is soley shaped by the television and the movie screen?

I have. And I have been as susceptible to it as any one. We got rid of cable because of it’s influencing properties. But we still watch movies, enjoy them and then get on with real life. Then pick and choose what we let our kids watch and teach them history as it truly happened.

Thank you Peregrine John, for another vapid cliche’…. obviously from your infinite supply.

Ok, fair. You see the positive things and ignore the rest. I respect this and should do the same in this case… acknowledge the positive in JW’s movies and what you are speaking of, but it is difficult. We are in a time now were what was always in operation is now transparently obvious…. that all commercial media is owned and in direct service of the Gov….(or visa versa, the separation, if any, is unclear). There is no independent media, and many forms of media that think or claim to be independent, is nothing of the sort. It is vital that people become aware of this, and of their own complicity and refusal to question.
Another point is how influence through media is achieved is different than the normal mechanisms one would expect…otherwise they wouldn’t work. The public needs to be unaware they are being influenced, not through one work, but the culminate work over generations.
John Wayne was a stock character, meaning it was the same person (the character) in different roles, whether western or set in Ireland. Similar to Schwarzneggar, Stallone, Harrison and Willis etc…. So I would disagree with what you say, (though I acknowledge your perspective.) The stock character is how media makes certain concepts of life acceptable. These concepts are a falsification of everything this society claims it is about… yet wider society is encouraged to believe that these are in fact, the quintessence of our society… which is correct can be decided based on this society’s actions.

“The great American hero, a trifecta of MacNamara, Rumsfield, Westmoreland and Santa Claus….the type of people who openly advocated the wholesale mass killing of civilians, (the verifiable count is well into the 100’s of millions, and is not limited to SE asia or Germany – they murdered overtly or covertly all over the world)….and did it as outside observers with no stake beyond war profits and political gain”

Etype, are you saying that the US has killed 100’s of millions? Or are you throwing McNamara, etc.’s count in with Hitler’s, Mao’s and Stalin’s? If the former, please tell me you’re quite fond of the movies of Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, and it’ll all make sense.

@AC
Why would you feel this is an debate about the plots of various movie genres? Doesn’t make sense otherwise? This is what I mean about the brain of the average westerner has been completely washed – through entertainment This is how you relax with your family – being brainwashed by visual media. Have you read Huxely’s ‘Brave New World’? Interesting book, prophetic… he wrote it after visiting California.
Michael Moore, Stone etc. is more of the same. Two sides of the same coin.
I enjoy movies, etc. but I know anything out of the US is made only to flatter me into believing lies – we are good, the rest evil who deserve death.

You are incapable of seeing the truth anymore, (ie.) you no longer have souls. You are the shiny, happy citizens of the evil empire…
You may not know it, but America is doomed.

As for the 100’s of millions – typo…should be 10’s of millions (civilians). Yet is probably reaches over a 100 million if full facts were known.
7 million German civilians dead through US bomber command alone.
2.2 million German soldiers demobbed by the US so they would not have access to the Geneva convention, and then starved to death.
500.000 Japanese civilians dead from initial blast of two nuclear weapons, 7 million die in the next 5 years, another 3 million in the 5 after that.

Note: the Japanese had already offered to surrender if the Emperor was respected. The US dropped the bomb only to recoup their investment, an amusing experiment, and to impress the Russians. The bullshit about saving lives of American soldiers is false.

The red cross estimates aprox. million Korean civilians died through deliberate targeting of civilian refugees attempting to escape to the south. This was the first time the US used the tactic of classifying military operations as ‘police action’ to escape scrutiny.

The number of Vietnamese citizens who died, (more bombs were dropped on N. Vietnam alone, the size of New Hampshire, than all the explosives dropped in WWII) is estimated to be greater than 10 million.
More carcinogenic poison were dropped on S.E Asia than the entire N. American agricultural industry has used in it’s entire history to date.

500.000 Iraqi children die through sanctions. A million plus civilians die through American ‘smart’ bomb technology along with other advanced democratic weapons.

That’s 20-30 million civilians of the most obvious listed here alone. There are untold others in countless other actions that testify to the fact the evil committed by the Nazi’s and Japanese was surpassed by a few hundred fold by the ‘good guys’.
Oh, that 20-30 million estimated was collated by the Red Cross, not Michael Moore or John Wayne or a movie director. And they never waivered from that figure until the pressure from various assassinations caused them to vacillate and finally apologize officially in 1998…when they realized they would have to read from the script written by the US and Israel. Welcome to the movies.

STINGRAY:
It is far more important to teach children to understand media than to shield them from it. You have absolutely no chance of shielding their innocence, you will only harm them. The only antidote is wisdom and faith.